How can industrial designers utilize and benefit from AI?

From inspiring creativity to refining product designs, streamlining iterations, and optimizing testing and manufacturing phases, it's clear that AI offers a wealth of benefits for industrial designers.

AI adoption in industrial design is also progressing rapidly. In fact, a 2023 report from McKinsey reveals that product and service development is one of the most commonly reported use cases of generative AI by organizations. The research firm also estimates that product research and design alone could unlock $60 billion in productivity. These statistics signal that AI, in its current state, is likely to augment human capabilities rather than replace them.

However, as an industrial designer, you may have questions about how AI can aid in product design, how you can integrate this tech into your design workflow, and how to ensure it meets your clients' needs. But, the most important question that may trouble you is whether AI is here to replace you.

This guide will help you address these concerns, offering potential ways to incorporate AI in your industrial design process and offer exceptional product designs to your customers.

Improved workflows and results 

Here's how you can use AI to your advantage and become a more efficient, innovative, and in-demand industrial designer:

Streamline your design workflow

AI can function as your turbocharged assistant, helping you from conceptualization to final execution. When developing a product concept, you can feed information about market demands, customer preferences, and historical data to recognize patterns in style and trends.

For instance, you could use prompts like:

• Explore the correlation between feature enhancements and customer satisfaction ratings in our last three product lines to inform our next design.
• Analyze historical data on customer inquiries and requests to guide the feature set of our upcoming product lines.

Alternatively, plug your feedback source in Kraftful and auto-generate surveys or actionable stories to improve your product development process. 

You can also leverage AI to generate new, totally unexplored product design ideas. With a few text prompts, AI tools like DALL-E and Midjourney will generate mood boards and innovative design concepts that can serve as a valuable source of inspiration.

Let's say you're tasked with designing a brand-new portable water purifier bottle for campers. 

Your prompt, in this case for DALL-E, could be "Design a rugged, durable portable water purifier bottle with a camouflage pattern, ideal for campers, featuring a built-in carabiner to attach to backpacks."

Remember, the more detailed your prompt is, the better the output will be. Consider the following aspects when crafting your prompt:

• Specificity: Detailed description of your product, including its features and the setting.
• Context: Where is your product used or placed?
• Purpose/Action: What action does your product need to perform, or what is its purpose?
• Visual Details: Mention colors, materials, or any distinctive feature.
• Perspective: In what view do you want to see the result? E.g., isometric, top view, side view, etc.

You could also use existing images as a prompt and refine your results. It could be a sketch, an existing product, abstract patterns, or any visual cue that you feel would help refine your product concept.

Once you've finalized the concepts, AI can further help you automate mundane tasks. For instance, AI-powered 3D modeling tools such as Meshy can take care of repetitive modeling tasks.

The tool's Text to 3D and Image to 3D features allow you to convert textual prompts and conceptual images into 3D objects. However, you'd need to refine the output to make it more usable. The tool allows you to download the 3D model in several formats, including stl and obj, which are compatible with 3D printing and CAD software.

Vizcom is another AI-powered tool that lets you refine your designs and produce photorealistic renderings through textual prompts. The tool also offers features like inpainting and an eraser, which makes refinement quick and easy. 

While AI takes care of these processes, you'll have more time to refine user experience and focus on higher-level design thinking.

Elevate your creativity

While AI can't replace human ingenuity, it's a perfect springboard for creativity. Use it to overcome your creative roadblocks and generate unique design solutions. Since AI tools produce results based on data and algorithms, it allows you to eliminate human bias from your designs. This capability will help you generate non-conventional ideas that could lead to innovative possibilities.

Why not a water purifier bottle with a cap that projects a holographic map of the surrounding area when twisted? With the right prompts, you can easily visualize how this out-of-the-box idea would look.

Beyond that, AI tools are also valuable for accelerating your design process and helping you reduce the time to market the product. Instead of an unclear design journey that often starts with multiple hand-drawn sketches, AI-generated conceptual images will give you a clear head start. 

The design iterations and experimentations resulting from this process become more meaningful and quick, leading to optimized final prototypes.

Swiftly transform ideas into reality

Transforming sketches into 3D models is a painstaking process. However, AI can help bridge this gap. Generative AI tools like Spline AI (launching soon) will allow you to quickly iterate designs, produce parametric 3D models, apply material properties, or even apply physical actions. You'll need to provide the tool with the right prompt and adjust the design parameters until you're satisfied with the results.

This quick translation from an idea to a creation will help validate your concepts quickly and efficiently. Validation also helps you make changes to your design before pushing it to the production floor, reducing engineering change orders (ECOs).

Additional resources

To deepen your understanding of AI, explore these resources to learn how you can apply the power of AI to your specific design needs.

• Find out how you can use generative AI tools in your creative process to shorten product development cycle times by up to 70%.
• Watch this video on the some gray things YouTube channel to learn how to create consistent, usable product designs using Midjourney.
• Follow along with students at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Division of Industrial Design as they explore AI's capabilities for designing innovative products.

You can also stay ahead of the AI curve with Fiverr's AI Knowledge Hub. Get answers to all your questions, access in-depth guides, or work with AI experts on your next project.